How will working in Elon Musk’s DOGE affect young Bay Area tech whizzes’ future careers?
A crew of young Bay Area technology whizzes working at Elon Musk’s controversial cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency may face fallout from their job choices for the rest of their careers, experts in hiring and reputation management say.
Akash Bobba, a UC Berkeley triple major in electrical engineering, computer science and business administration, for example, was featured in a recent legal filing central to the high-stakes battle over DOGE and its access to America’s government agencies and systems.
Bobba was called out by name in the court filing by a recently retired high-ranking Social Security Administration official who accused him and others working under Musk of receiving unprecedented and dangerous access to Americans’ most sensitive personal and financial information. Bobba is not currently enrolled at Cal and has not graduated, according to the school.
“The history of DOGE is yet to be written, but I’m not sure its history will be kind to the young technology acolytes who participated in this process,” said Sam Singer, a prominent Bay Area public relations and crisis management consultant. “I’m not sure they understand how the government agencies work at the same time that they’re wielding a big sword and cutting things that are vital to American citizens.”
Bobba is among the DOGE associates entrenched in the agency’s systems who lack appropriate training and vetting and are working without proper information-security protections, according to former Social Security Administration acting chief of staff Tiffany Flick.
“The risk of data leaking into the wrong hands is significant,” Flick said in a March 7 filing in a federal lawsuit in Maryland by labor unions over DOGE’s work in the agency. Flick, who retired last month, said she was not confident Bobba and his colleagues understand the agency’s systems well enough to avoid “critical errors” in the payment of benefits.
Flick’s statement highlighted the controversial profile earned by the young Bay Area-linked DOGE staff working, ostensibly, to purge the federal government of wasteful spending, diversity programs and staff. But DOGE’s work has led to numerous lawsuits and widespread condemnation by Democrats claiming the group — created via executive order by Republican President Donald Trump — is usurping the powers of Congress over spending and establishing government agencies.
Other young tech workers known to be currently or formerly working for DOGE include Ethan Shaotran, a 2020 graduate of Gunn High School in Palo Alto; Gavin Kliger, a 2020 UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science graduate; Luke Farritor, a fellow at the Thiel Foundation created by influential conservative Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel; Edward Coristine, who according to Wired magazine spent three months at Musk-founded Neuralink brain-computer interface company in Fremont; and Marko Elez, an engineer who has worked at Musk’s San Francisco social media company X.
Shaotran, Farritor and Elez are also embedded in the Social Security Administration, Wired magazine reported this week.
None of these DOGE workers, or Musk, responded to requests for comment.
Last month, Musk defended DOGE’s work, saying “the people voted for major government reform.” Republican lawmakers have voiced support, with Rep. Tom McClintock, described as a deficit hawk whose district southeast of Sacramento includes Yosemite National Park, declaring “in DOGE we trust” as lawmakers took up a bill this week to continue funding the government.
For the young men, working for DOGE will likely narrow some potential career paths and expand others, said Jesse Meschuk, a Los Angeles human resources consultant and former Activision Blizzard and Blizzard Entertainment executive who has tracked the furor over DOGE.
“It’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Meschuk said, noting that DOGE’s stated goals involve creating operational efficiency by analyzing and solving complex problems. “Those skills could be transferable to a lot of private-sector opportunities.”
Also, the DOGE work puts these young men close to senior government figures and influential corporate leaders, including Bay Area venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, close advisers to Trump. Those connections and the work the DOGE staffers are undertaking could lead to future jobs in and outside government, Meschuk said.
“There might still end up being quite a few companies or conservative government jobs where the work and attempts to do this might be viewed positively in trying to create change,” Meschuk said.
Still, the DOGE work is “very politically charged, and it’s extraordinarily sensitive,” Meschuk said. Should the results of that work become widely unpopular, the young workers’ career paths could shrink among “private-sector companies or even government operations, depending on how that company leans or who’s in power in the government,” Meschuk said.
Singer believes a significant number of well-known companies would never bring on workers with DOGE baggage.
“On the other hand, political jobs within the Republican Party or within corporations that are aligned with the far right or Trumpists, they’ve clearly got a future,” Singer said.
Media scrutiny of DOGE workers led to news reports that Coristine was accused of leaking company information to a competitor while an intern — he told Bloomberg he did “nothing contractually wrong — and Elez made racist remarks on social media.
Coristine and Elez might have opportunities in companies led by Musk, who founded Neuralink, owns social media platform X, and is CEO of electric car maker Tesla, rocket company SpaceX and artificial intelligence firm xAI, Singer said.
“The people he’s chosen as part of the DOGE team are obviously people he has trust in,” Singer said. “I assume that whatever happens, good or bad out of DOGE, he would display some loyalty and either take them in house at one of his companies or assist them in getting a job with someone who’s ideologically aligned with him.”